brief_history_of_the_worldfandomcom-20200215-history
Cradles of Civilisation
Ancient History is the first of the major chronological divisions of world history, and lasted from about 3500 BC until 776 BC. It began with the end of Prehistory, when human potential and the necessity for conflict or cooperation provided the foundations for the first civilisations in the so-called 'Cradles of Civilisation. It then ended with their collapse, which allowed for the emergence of a series of empires of unprecedented size and complexity; Classical Greece, Classical Rome, Classical Persia, Classical India, and Classical China. The choice of 776 BC, the year of the first Olympic Games in Greece, is obviously a Eurocentric view, but similar dates apply when considering wider world history. Civilisation has been one of the great accelerators of man-made change. It is generally accepted to have arisen independently, or with minimal stimulation, at least seven times. The best case for the first appearance of something that is recognisably civilisation has been made by Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq) around 3300 BC. The next example is in Egypt on the River Nile, observable at a slightly later date, perhaps 3100 BC. Another marker in the Near East is Minoan civilisation which appeared in Crete in about 2000 BC, after which this part of the world was already a complex of civilisations in interplay with one another. Meanwhile, further east and perhaps around 2500 BC, another civilization had appeared in India on the Indus River, and was to some degree literate. China’s first civilization on the Yellow River starts later, perhaps 1600 BC. Later still came civilisation in the Americas, the Olmec of Mexico around 1200 BC and Chavín of Peru in perhaps 900 BC. Most, but not all, developed in river valleys, which granted the inhabitants considerable advantages: a reliable source of water for drinking and agriculture; an assured food surplus from the fertile soil as well as fish; ease of transportation for trade; and the need to work cooperatively on flood defence and irrigation projects. From these few flickering Cradles of Civilisation, other cultures were sparked through interaction, stimulation, and inheritance. They also allowed the two great innovations of Ancient History to flourish: systems of writing and organised religion. Some of these early civilizations are still real foundations of our own world, because of the power of the traditions which sprang from them. On the other hand, some now exercise little or no influence, except perhaps upon our imaginations when we contemplate the relics which are all that is now left of them. History The Potential for Civilisation When does history begin? If we want to we can trace the chain of human descent back to the appearance of Homo Sapiens, something recognisably humanity however raw in form. We can go back further still to the first monkeys and apes about thirty-five million years ago, or even to almost unimaginable upheavals which formed this planet. Yet this is not "history". History is the story of mankind, of what it has done, suffered or enjoyed. We all know that dogs and cats do not have histories, while human-beings do. Human culture alone is progressive; it has been increasingly built by the accumulation of a capital of experience and knowledge which man has exploited. History is the story of civilisation, one of the great accelerators of man-made change. By about 3500 BC, a succession of momentous changes had taken place that were the essential building blocks of civilisation. Unquestionably the most important was an increase in food supply through the invention of agriculture from 10,000 BC; the growing of crops and the practice of animal husbandry. An assured food surplus meant bigger populations could live on smaller areas and settlements of a new solidity could appear; early "cities". Specialists not engaged in food production could now be tolerated, as well as a priestly class which elaborated complex religious practices, for religion has deep roots stretching far back into prehistory, and hinted at in Neanderthal burial practices and elaborate cave paintings. Villages thus became centres of trade, absorbing agricultural products, and in return providing manufactured goods and a degree of military protection. In the long run metallurgy changed things as much as did farming. Once the technique of blending copper with tin to produce bronze was discovered, a metal was available that was both relatively easy to cast and retained a cutting edge. Its obvious military value springs to the eye, but it had just as much importance when turned into agricultural tools; turning over heavy soil nevertheless only became possible with the coming of iron. Metallurgy also gave a new twist to trade, stimulating far-flung trade networks. As villages developed complex economic and social structures, sophisticated language and proto-writing systems were needed to facilitate administration, to express ideas, and to preserve information. Villages developed a distinct culture and elaborate painted pottery, one of the most widespread forms of art in late prehistory. At the edge of history we already encounter a creature like ourselves - mankind, not nature, was increasingly the maker of change. For a long as we know there has been at Jericho (modern day Palestine) a never failing spring that feeds what is still today a sizable oasis. No double it explains why people have lived there on and off for more than ten thousand years. Before 6000 BC, it had grown to some eight to ten acres of mud-brick houses. Great water-tanks, probably for irrigation, suggest provision for a considerable population. And there was a massive stone tower and substantial walls long kept in repair; clearly its inhabitants thought they had something worth defending. At around the same time, copper was first being hammered into shape without heating and then smelted at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (modern day Turkey), a site only slightly younger. For all that, this was not the beginning of true civilisation. Yet in certain regions of the world after 3500 BC farming villages existed in a density upon which civilisation could eventually be raised. Civilisation in Mesopotamia The best case for the first appearance of something that is recognisably civilisation has been made by Mesopotamia, the seven-hundred-mile-long land formed by the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys. This is the centre of the region later called the ''Fertile Crescent'', an arc of territory running northwards from Egypt through Palestine to Anatolia (modern day Tukey), and extending east to the hills of Persia (modern day Iran). Here was seen some of the earliest farmers and the first large settlements; there is evidence of the harvesting, though not necessarily cultivating, of wild barley and wheat as early as 9500 BC. Much of it now looks very different from the same area’s lush landscape five thousand ago. Egypt enjoyed enough rain for the hunting of big game well into historical times, and elephants were still to be found in Syrian forests in 1000 BC. Mesopotamia had for millennia been a turmoil of racial comings and goings both enriching and disrupting the region; Caucasian people (native inhabitants of the Caucasus) from the north, Semitic language speakers from of the Arabian peninsula, Hamitic peoples from Africa, and later Indo-Europeans of Central Asia from the east and north. No doubt this collision or cooperation of peoples and ideas is much of the story of the appearance of the earliest true civilizations there. '''Sumerian Civilisation (3300-2000) had deep roots; Sumer is an ancient name for southern Mesopotamia. In prehistory, the lower stretches of the two great rivers was thickly studded with farming villages because of the annual flooding which built-up wonderfully rich soil; it must have been much easier to grow crops there than elsewhere. Such a setting was a challenge, as well as an opportunity. Irrigation and flood defences could be managed properly only if they were managed collectively. Furthermore, despite the ease of farming, the region had few mineral resources to speak of, therefore Mesopotamia had to trade, and long distance trade can be traced far back into prehistory. Meanwhile, the people of different towns long shared a way of life not very different from that of their neighbours. Each grew around a local temple, which also acted as the communities common storehouse and centre of economic activity. These were fundamentally agrarian societies, but could support specialised labour such as tool makers, weavers, shoemaker, healers, artisan, and notably potters. Their pottery was somewhat duller than earlier examples, because they were mass-produced on a potters-wheel; the earliest use of one of the most important advances in early technology. Sizeable towns gradually appeared, with several being true cities with tens-of-thousands of inhabitants; one city recorded 36,000 males. Thus Sumer was also the first true urban civilization. To meet the administrative needs of ever growing cities, the temple priestly rulers developed a system of pictographs to record economic transactions, which gradually became more abstract and stylised, until there finally emerged the world's first system of writing soon after 3000 BC; the Cuneiform Script. A few of its words have survived to this day; one is the original form of the word "alcohol", for another Sumerian first is the oldest known standard recipe for brewing beer. Writing also gives us greater insight into the Sumerian mind. The oldest story in the world is the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was almost certainly a real person, the king of the city-state of Uruk. It was he who supposedly built the great six-miles-long walls of the city, dating from a little after 3000 BC. To the modern reader the most striking part of the Epic may be the coming of a great flood which obliterated mankind, except for one favoured family; undeniably paralleling the Bible story of Noah’s Ark. A fatalistic and sombre mood dominates the Epic and indeed the Sumerian polytheistic religion. This doubtless reflected the difficulty of life in Sumer, where the soil was very rich, but, unlike the River Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates were prone to unpredictable and violent flooding. The Sumerians can hardly have derived much comfort from their beliefs. They saw themselves as a people created to labour for the gods, and in return the gods would grant prosperity and length of days, but not more; their version of the afterlife seems a gloomy sad place, where the dead "live in darkness, eat clay, and are clothed like birds with wings". Scholars have recovered some of the 1300 years of history of Sumer, but much of it remains obscure. Kish was the first city-state to rise to preeminence in the region from about 3100 BC; the first king verifiable from other sources, Etana, isn't for another three centuries. Kish kept its hegemony only briefly until the rise of the city of Uruk, which was eventually in turn eclipsed by its neighbour, Ur. Thereafter, it's a story of protracted power struggles between the rulers of Kish, Uruk and Ur. We know more about Ur than the others because it appears in the Bible; it was the original home of the Prophet Abraham. The Tower of Babel in the Bible is probably a reference to the Great Ziggurat of Ur, a ''monumental temple like a step pyramid common throughout Sumer, this one over 100 feet high with a base 200 feet by 150. The royal cemetery at Ur has revealed an astonishing array of sophisticated objects: a beautifully sculpted wood and gold goat; exquisitely ornamented musical instruments, including harps and lutes; and copper spears and helmets. This period saw the application of the wheel to military technology in clumsy four-wheeled chariots, and also a subtle shift from priestly-rulers to warrior-kings; probably they began as warlords appointed by cities to command their armies. The end of the process of dividing secular and religious authority came when Sumer fell to a foreign conqueror, '''Sargon I '(d. 2284 BC). He was of the nomadic Semitic peoples which for thousands of years had pressed-in on the civilizations of the river valleys from outside. Sargon seized power in Ur, and gradually conquered all of the Sumerian cities by 2334 BC, before founding a capital of his own at Akkad. The evolution of professional armies probably played a part in it. Sargon it was boasted had 5400 soldiers eating before him in his palace. The Akkadian Dynasty (2270–2083 BC) was not the end of Sumer, however, but its second main phase. Sargon’s rule was not based on the relative superiority of one city-state to the others, it was a true centralised state. He was the first of a long line of empire-builders, and at its peak the Akkadian sphere of influence, either through direct conquest or control of trade, stretched from the Mediterranean coast of Syria to the head of the Persian Gulf. Akkadian supremacy also brought an important innovation in the history of writing, for they adapted the Sumerian Cuneiform Script to meet the needs of a Semitic language, demonstrating the splendid flexibility of the writing system. The empire established by Sargon lasted for some 180 years, before hegemony again passed to the native Sumerians. But this was the sunset of the first people to achieve civilization. In about 2000 BC, the region was overrun by tribes from the north. Of course they did not disappear, but their great creative era was behind them, and they merged into the general history of the Near East. The legacy of Sumer is still very much with us today: the number seven had some special religious meaning to them giving us our seven day week; their counting system was based on the number 60 to which we owe our circle of 360 degrees and the hour of sixty minutes; Cuneiform characters, though not the writing system, passed through the Phoenicians eventually to the Ancient Greeks; and Biblical writers were inspired by their stories and myths, for instance Sargon was supposedly a foundling left by his mother in a basket long before Moses. By 2000 BC, all over the Fertile Crescent new kingdoms and peoples had already appeared. Unlike the slightly later Egyptian Civilisation where an enduring stable state was established, for the next 1500 years Mesopotamia was characterised by a succession of shifting empires, small independent city-states struggling for survival, and constant warfare. One convenient landmark is provided by the appearance of a new empire in lower Mesopotamia, one which has left behind a famous name; Babylon (1792-1600 BC). Her reputation as the worldly, wicked city of pleasure and consumption owes more to a later period. Another famous name is inseparably linked to it, that of its kings from 1728 BC, Hammurabi (d. 1750 BC). By the end of his reign, he had defeated his regional rivals and brought the whole of Mesopotamia was under his direct control, with an elaborate administrative structure. Hammurabi’s code of laws, cut in stone and set up in the courtyard of temples for the public to consult, is justly famous. It assembled some 282 articles, no doubt from rules already current, dealing comprehensively with a wide range of questions: wages, divorce, fees for medical attention, legal rights of slaves, and that the punishment for taking an eye should be having an eye taken. The Babylonians would also bring mathematics, astronomy, and science to their early peaks; in all these areas they were much more advanced than the Egyptians. Further north, a people known as the Hittites and speaking an Indo-European language had establish themselves as the dominant power in Anatolia by 1700 BC. They destroyed Babylon sometime after 1600 BC, after which a very confused era opened for Mesopotamia. A century later Babylon re-established itself in lower Mesopotamia under the Kassite Dynasty, but it now had to content with many rival powers, notably the Assyrians in upper Mesopotamia and the formidable Hittites of Anatolia. Nevertheless this turmoil also made Mesopotamia fertile ground for innovation: fortification and presumably siege-craft reached a fairly high level throughout the region by 2000 BC; the Hittites were the first civilization with iron smelting technology from perhaps 1500 BC, a great stimulus to agriculture as well as warfare; the Kassites were the first to make effective use of the composite bow, two-wheeled war chariots, and later horse-cavalry; and the earliest experiments with money, copper ingots, developed there too, although we have to wait until the 8th-century BC for the Assyrians to have the first true metal currency. Furthermore, Mesopotamia was the cradle of the Hebrew prophets whose great historical impact are still very much with us today. From 1200 BC, the region entered an even more confused era known as the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Civilisation in Egypt For thousands of years after it had died, the richness of the physical remains of Egyptian Civilisation (3100-1075 BC) have fascinated men’s minds and stirred their imaginations. Even the Ancient Greeks were bemused by the legendary occult wisdom of a land where gods were half men, half beasts, and today people still waste their time trying to discern a supernatural significance in the arrangement of the pyramids. Ancient Egypt was defined by the River Nile and the deserts which flanked it. Before 4000 BC, the drying of the Sahara increasingly confined the various hunter-gatherer communities that lived in the region to the immediate river valley. The great river was regular and benign, making for one of the safest and richest agricultural areas in the world. Each summer, the Nile flooded the fields at precisely the same time, and left behind wonderfully nutrient-rich silt for planting season. It was also uncommonly easily navigable; the river flows from south to north, while the prevailing winds blow in the opposite direction. Through working together on the laborious task of irrigation, Egyptian communities could create big food surpluses with relative ease. At some time in the 4th-millennium BC there solidified two kingdoms, one of Lower Egypt and one of Upper. Thus Egypt seems to have moved straight from pre-civilization to the government over large areas. How this happened remains obscure, for it is interestingly different from the Sumerian Civilisation; there were no city-states. Indeed even later, Memphis and Thebes were great religious centres and palace complexes, rather than cities, and Egypt never enjoyed true urbanism. The event that the Ancient Egyptians''' themselves pointed to as the beginning of their civilisation was the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in about 3100 BC. Tradition credits this to a king or Pharaoh called '''Menes, though that is merely the word for "founder". His is the first of thirty-one Egyptian dynasties of Pharaohs, spanning over two thousand years; an example of social continuity rivalled in human history only by China. Roughly speaking, that civilization’s greatest days were over by about 1000 BC. Before that, Egyptian history can most easily be visualised in five big divisions: three of these are called respectively the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom; and these are separated by two other periods called the First and Second Intermediate. Very roughly, the three Kingdoms were periods of success or at least of consolidated government, while the two Intermediate stages were interludes of weakness and disruption by internal and external crises. The Old Kingdom (2686–2160) began with the 3rd Dynasty, several obscure centuries after the unification of Egypt. During this period, Egypt enjoyed a Golden Age of peace and prosperity, and almost all the essential elements of Egyptian civilisation were established. It was later to be looked back upon as a time of stability when Pharaohs were impregnable. All power rested in the Pharaoh, who was considered a god. He was believed to control the rise and fall of the Nile itself, and to be divinely omniscient, so needed no code of law to guide him. He owned all the land, controlled the irrigation system, and received all the surplus from agriculture. Beneath the Pharaoh was an impressive hierarchy of bureaucrats; chief civil servants and provincial governors directing the thousands of scribes needed to service an elaborate government. The Egyptian writing system was probably borrowed from the early Sumerian system of pictographs. However, they rejected the later Cuneiform Script, and instead it evolved into Hieroglyphic Writing, lifelike little pictures or near-pictures, very harder to master. The ability to read Hieroglyph was an important aspect of the priestly class and accordingly a closely guarded professional secret. None of the Classical Greek scholars ever learnt to read Hieroglyphs; deciphering it would only be accomplished thanks to a French scholar accompanying a French army in Egypt in the late-18th-century who discovered the Rosetta Stone. The Egyptian Pharaoh directed a country in which most people were peasants, who provided the surplus upon which a noble class, the bureaucracy and a great religious establishment could subsist. Upon them also rested Egypt’s own spectacular form of conspicuous consumption, a range of great public works in stone unsurpassed in antiquity. These provided employment for peasants during the months when the Nile flooded, but they were primarily an act of religious faith in the Pharaoh, on whom the security and prosperity of Egypt depended. Pyramid construction began under the greatest pharaoh of the 3rd Dynasty, Djoser, who commissioned the 200-foot-high Step Pyramid at Saqqara near Memphis in about 2620 BC. It was the masterpiece of the first architect whose name is recorded; Imhotep, chancellor to the Pharaoh. Zoser's funerary example was taken to even more elaborate lengths by his successors at Giza. The three great pyramids at Giza were built between about 2550 and 2470 BC for Khufu, his son Khafre and grandson Menkure. The first and largest, the Great Pyramid, remained the tallest structure built by man for more than 3,800 years. Khafre was also responsible for the Egypt's most recognisable symbol, the Great Sphinx, built around 2500 BC. Although the Egyptians did invent the stone column, their great building achievement was not so much architectural and technical, but an unprecedented concentration of human labour, highly skilled surveying, and fairly elementary mathematics; Egyptian mathematics and indeed astronomy were left far behind by the Babylonians. It was also during the Old Kingdom that the practice of mummification began, to preserve the Pharaoh for the afterlife and judgement before the god Osiris; if the verdict was favourable he would live in Osiris’ kingdom, if not he was abandoned to a monstrous destroyer, part crocodile and part hippopotamus. Seventy days, under the supervision of temple priests, was the ritual period in Ancient Egypt for embalming and wrapping a corpse. Egyptian pre-eminence in medicine was long internationally recognised throughout the Eastern Mediterranean. Much of our knowledge of medicinal plants and drugs was first established by the Egyptians and passed from them through the Greeks eventually to medieval Europe. Our knowledge of the detailed history of the Old Kingdom is fragmented: Egyptian raids far to the south into Nubia; a series of expeditions against the peoples of Palestine; shipments of cedar arriving from Lebanon; and mining operations undertaken in the copper rich Sinai Peninsula. The Pharaohs of the 6th Dynasty lacked the vigour of their predecessors, and their rule was followed by a century of anarchy. Largely independent provinces appeared throughout Egypt, which founded their own dynasties and fought each other. The Middle Kingdom (2052-1786) and stability were restored by the powerful Mentuhotep II (d. 2010 BC) who reunified the kingdom and moved the capital from Memphis to Thebes. Under the Middle Kingdom there was new focus on order and social cohesion. Pharaohs put greater emphasis on their role as watchful shepherds of the people, promoting the welfare of the downtrodden. No longer was the nation's wealth expended on huge pyramids, but on more functional public works such as land reclamation in the marshes of the Nile. Not only the Pharaohs now had an afterlife to look forward to; wealthy nobles could be mummified. The first standing army was established, and Nubia (modern day Sudan) to the south was partially conquered and its gold-mines fully exploited; Nubia had long been important to the trade in luxuries, such as gold, ivory, ebony, leopard skins, and ostrich feathers. This period was also notable for a shift in the Egyptian polytheistic pantheon of the gods, with cult of Amun, god of the sky, merging with that of the sun-god Ra and taking over from Osiris as head of the pantheon; dynastic politics and religion were always bedfellows in Egypt. After four centuries, the Middle Kingdom ended with the weak 13th-Dyansty which was plagued by internal problems; in little more than a century about 70 Pharaohs occupied the throne. This allowed a foreign peoples to seize control of Lower Egypt, and render Upper Egypt almost a vassal state. These were the Hyksos of whom very little is known except that they enjoyed superior military technology, including the composite bow, horses, and iron-fitted chariots. Eventually, a powerful family from Thebes grew strong enough to drive the intruders north, until Ahmose I of the 18th-Dynasty finally expelled them completely. This was the start of the New Kingdom (1554-1075), whose first great success was to follow-up victory by pursuing the Hyksos into their strongholds in Palestine. The New Kingdom in its prime was so successful that it's difficult not to think that Hyksos domination must have had a fertilising effect. There was a renaissance of the arts, a transformation of military techniques, and a consolidation of royal authority. The New Kingdom provides the bulk of the art, other than the pyramids, for which Ancient Egypt is famous today. Pharaohs created at Thebes the great temples of Karnak and Luxor, and are buried on the other side of the Nile in the Valley of the Kings. This was also an era of conquest and empire. The Pharaoh Thutmose I (d. 1493 BC) vigorously expanded the boundaries of Egypt, south to retake Nubia, and north as far as Palestine and Syria. His daughter Hatshepsut (d. 1458 BC) was the first female to occupied the throne, initially as regent for her son and then as Pharaoh in her own right; she appeared on monuments in full male attire wearing a false beard. Hatshepsut ruled as forcefully as any man, expanding Egypt influence predominantly through trade, notably to the Land of Punt (modern day Somalia). By this time, the eastern Mediterranean (Egypt, Mesopotamia and Mycenaean Greece) can almost be seen as one unified coherent system, with international commerce, wars for regional dominance, diplomacy and intermarriage, and long-distant trade stretching as far away as mineral rich Spain and the Neolithic societies of the European interior. Probably Egypt's greatest conqueror was Hatshepsut's step-son, the Pharaoh Thutmose III (d. 1425 BC), who took the Egyptian empire to its limits. He led her armies on seventeen campaigns as far as the Euphrates, and is sometimes called the "Napoleon of Egypt". Native princes of Palestine, Syria, and Phoenicia were left on their thrones as vassals, but their sons were taken to Egypt, in part as hostages but also to be educated or indoctrinated into the Egyptian way of life. Nevertheless by 1372 BC the Egyptian sphere of influence was crumbling, and they lost all of their lands west of the Euphrates to the Hittites. This event probably prompted one Pharaoh to attempt a religious revolution in order to break the power of the temple priests, later reversed by his son Tutankhamun (d. 1323). This explains his subsequent magnificent burial in the Valley of the Kings, after only a short and otherwise unremarkable reign. When he died, the New Kingdom had two centuries of life ahead, but their atmosphere is one of only occasionally interrupted and steadily accelerating decline. Yet these declining decades also provides the name today most commonly associated with the Pharaohs, Ramesses. This is partly because Ramesses II (d. 1213 BC) commissioned one of the best known images of Egypt, four colossal seated statues of himself at Abu Simbel, each some 65 ft high. During his sixty-six-year reign, Egypt was calm and prosperous, her long struggle with the Hittites in Syria was resolved, and building projects like Karnak were completed. As a result of Ramses' resounding success, members of the 20th dynasty all took his name, from Ramses III to Ramses XI. But there were yet more new enemies appearing. The eastern Mediterranean was in uproar, the islands pouring out the mysterious Sea Peoples and "no land stood before them", say the Egyptian records; perhaps similar to the Vikings of the northern seas 2000 years later. It was during these years that a small Semitic people whom the Egyptians called Hebrews left the delta and followed their leader Moses out of Egypt into the deserts of Sinai. From about 1150 BC the signs of internal and external troubles are plentiful; popular unrest, the looting of the royal tombs, and Libya and Nubia both re-asserted their independence. The last of the 20th Dynasty, Ramses XI (d. 1075 BC), was virtually a prisoner in his own palace. When he died, Egypt was again divided into Upper and Lower kingdoms. Tough times lay ahead not only for Egypt, but the world which was the setting of her glories was passing away; the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Egypt would first loss her independence to the Libyans in 945 BC, then the Assyrians, then the Persians, and finally to Alexander the Great. Despite the spectacular heritage of her monuments and a history counted not in centuries but in millennia, the legacy of Egyptian civilisation is hard to assess. When looking back, it is difficult not to sense an ultimate sterility at the heart of this glittering tour-de-force. Once the creative jump had been made to civilisation, her people seem slow to adopt new skills and reluctant to innovate. Egypt had been in contact with Mesopotamia for getting on for 500 years before she adopted the potters-wheel, and bronze-making does not appear until well after 2000 BC. Colossal resources of labour were amassed under the direction of outstanding civil servants, and the end results were the creation of the greatest tombstones the world has ever seen. Craftsmanship of exquisite quality was employed, and their masterpieces were grave-goods. A highly literate elite utilised a complex and subtle language, but contributed no philosophy or literature to compare with the Sumerians or Jewish people. Her civilisation was never successfully spread abroad, and in the end she made little permanent difference to the world. Only in papyrus and medicine is there indisputable originality, but these can be traced at least as far back as the Old Kingdom. On the banks of the River Nile, a grateful and passive people gathered the richness it bestows, and set aside what they thought necessary for the real business of living; the proper preparation for death. Early Civilised Life in the Aegean Of the first civilisation in the Aegean, Minoan Crete (1900-1500 BC), we know very little. Even the name derives from a King Minos who may never have existed; the legendary king whose monstrous son, the Minotaur, devoured sacrificial youths and maids at the heart of a labyrinth, eventually penetrated successfully by the hero Theseus. Crete seems then, as today, to have been better for the production of olives and vines, two of the great staples of later Mediterranean agriculture, than either the other islands or mainland Greece. By about 2500 BC, there were important towns and villages on the coasts, built of stone and brick, and whose inhabitants practised metal-working, made attractive jewelry, and exchanged goods with the mainland Greece and other Aegean communities. There then came a change. About 600 years later they began to build a series of great palaces at Knossos, Mallia and Phaistos. Nothing quite as impressive appears anywhere else and it exercised a cultural hegemony over more or less the whole of the Aegean. For four centuries they prospered, trading extensively over a wide region from Sicily in the west, to Egypt and Mesopotamia in the east. There was even believed to be an Egyptian ambassador for some time at Knossos, presumably to watch over well-established interests. Minoan government left a huge collection of thousands of clay tablets, which indicate systematic administration, but little else, for the script had not yet been deciphered. Art remains its most spectacular legacy, especially frescoes of startling liveliness and movement; pictures of the peculiar rites of bull-leaping, sports and dancing do not suggest an unhappy people. Indeed this seems to have been a remarkably peaceful society; defensive walls are notably absent in Minoan Crete, as are frescoes of warfare. Its peak came about 1600BC. A century or so later, the Minoan palaces were destroyed. It is only possible to guess about what happened: recent scholarship identifies a great volcanic eruption nearby in about 1525 BC that could have been accompanied by tidal waves and clouds of ash; while some have discerned signs of an invasion from the sea. Whatever the cause, this gave Greeks from the mainland their chance. The Mycenaean Greeks (1600-1100 BC) of the mainland were barbarians by comparison with the Minoans. More aware of the role of war in society than were the islanders, they used horses and war-chariot, but had no art or writing system of their own. With the adoption of a Semitic alphabet, the Phoenician, by about 800 BC it reveals a people whose language was basically Greek. The Mycenaeans fortified their towns heavily, and contributed to the future one enduring symbol of Greek life, the fortress palaces on the high place of the town, or acropolis. Some of these sites were to be the later centres of Greek city-states; Athens and Pylos were among them. One of the most important was at Mycenae, which gave its name to the civilization that spread over all of mainland Greece by 1600 BC. Royal burials at Mycenae add to the impression of a powerful military society. The tombs of the 16th-century BC contain a profusion of bronze swords and daggers, and bronze-tipped spears, together with much gold treasure. A tomb from the 14th-century contains the earliest known suit of armour: a pointed helmet with bronze cheek flaps; a curving bronze breast plate also covering the shoulders; a semi-flexible bronze skirt down to the thighs; and completed by bronze greaves. Each considerable city had a king, presiding over a society of warrior landowners with peasant tenants and slaves. There are Hittite diplomatic records which suggest some degree of political federation among the kings. Meanwhile, the Mycenaeans replaced the Cretan trading supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean with its own. It had trading posts in Palestine and was treated as a power by Hittite kings. Then in the latter half of the 13th-century, according to well-established oral tradition, the rulers of Mycenaean Greece joined forces for a prolonged assault on Troy, the richest city on the Ionian coast of Anatolia (modern day Turkey). Some centuries later the oral tradition would be written down by Homer as the Iliad. If there is truth in this, the war perhaps fatally weakened the Mycenaeans, for the Dark Ages of the Aegean were about to close in. At the end of the 13th century the great Mycenaean centres were destroyed, at the hands of uncivilised northern invaders known as the Dorians. The decline of Greece was part of a wider pattern of chaos in the eastern Mediterranean often called the Late Bronze Age Collapse; as far away as Ancient Egypt, the Pharaohs struggled against invasion from the mysterious Sea People. Late Bronze Age Collapse in the Near East By the middle of the second millennia, the entire eastern Mediterranean can almost be seen as one unified coherent system, with international commerce between different civilisations, wars for regional dominance, diplomacy and intermarriage, and long-distant trade as far away as mineral rich Spain and the Neolithic societies of the European interior. Then in a few decades after 1200 BC, there was cultural collapse across the whole region; the Mycenaean Greece, Kassite Babylonia, Hittite Anatolia, and Ancient Egypt. According to historian Robert Drews, "Within a period of forty to fifty years at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the twelfth century almost every significant city in the eastern Mediterranean world was destroyed, many of them never to be occupied again." ''The cause of the so-called '''Late Bronze Age Collapse' has puzzled historians and archaeologists for centuries. Many have ascribed the collapse to migrations and invasions, spurred perhaps by the diffusion of iron weapons and hinted at in the mysterious Egyptian reference to the "Sea Peoples". Another theory, originally proposed by Amos Nur, argues that there was a protracted series of violent earthquakes, that destabilised the region both physically and politically. Still other historians argue that it was the result of climate change, a notably drier period similar to the Little Ice Age, that prompted widespread crop failures and famines. Other theories abound but it remains one of the great historical mysteries. A very few powerful states survived the collapse, notably the Assyrians, although it did endure a century of comparative decline slightly later, probably from the severe interruption to trade routes. For centuries after 1200 BC, the history of the eastern Mediterranean is one of contusion. Invaders came and went rapidly, some of them establishing new states to replace those they overthrew. Nevertheless, some like the Phoenicians (1200–800 BC) prospered from the decline of great powers. They were a Semitic people already settled on the narrow coastal strip of the modern Lebanon in the early-2nd-millennium BC. Their shallow hinterland was poor in agricultural resources, so geography urged them to look outwards and become seafarers. Yet they were weak, and came under the sway of Egyptian and Hittite in turn. It was after 1200 BC, that the Phoenician cities of Tyre, Byblos, and Sidon had their brief Golden Age. Ancient writers often stressed their reputation as traders and long-distance navigators of legendary skill and acumen. No doubt commercial need stimulated Phoenician inventiveness; it is in the field of writing that they made their most lasting contribution to world history. All scripts in use before 1500 BC required years of study to learn large numbers of separate characters, expressing either a whole word or a syllable. By contrast the Phoenicians developed an entirely new approach to writing; the first true phonetic alphabet. This was a great step, making a more widespread literacy possible. The Ancient Greeks would adopt the Phoenician system of writing in the 8th-century-BC; the medium of the first Western literature. No remarkable Phoenician literature survives however, for trade was their preoccupation and resulted in a network of overseas colonies or trading posts. The furthest lay just beyond the entrance to the Mediterranean, on the site of modern Cadiz. The most famous was Carthage which was to become the seat of a formidable power. These colonies might also reflect the time of troubles at home. In the 7th-century Sidon was razed to the ground, and Tyre and Byblos came under the control of a succession of imperial powers; Phoenicia was then reduced to its colonies. Then there is the case of the Jewish people. Only in a time when great powers were in decline, could a minor Semitic peoples like the Hebrews have established the Kingdom of Israel (1050-587 BC) in the crucial area of Palestine. The destiny of the whole world was to be swayed for centuries by the Christian and Islamic civilizations whose roots lay in the religious tradition of Judaism. Israel was eventually swept away by the spectacular last phase of Assyrians, who at their peak controlled the entire Fertile Crescent from Egypt to the hills of Persia; the Neo-Assyrian Empire (911–627 BC). Assyria’s collapse left the Fertile Crescent open to new masters. A Babylonian king, Nebuchadnezzar (d. 562), gave Mesopotamian civilisation her own last Indian summer of grandeur. The glory of his short-lived empire came in a great New Year festival held each year, where the idols of gods from provincial shrines came down the rivers and canals to the temple of the Babylonian god Marduk. They were then taken into the presence of a statue of the god supposedly made of two and a quarter tons of gold, to acknowledge his supremacy. If for nothing else, Nebuchadnezzar would be remembered for the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Two decades later in 539 BC, Babylon itself was conquered by an invader from the east, the Persian King Cyrus the Great (d. 530 BC). In so far as the story of antiquity has a turning-point, this is it. The Bronze Age collapse was over, and two new great civilisations would now contests the eastern Mediterranean; Classical Greece in the Aegean, and the mighty Ancient Persian Empire centred in Iran. Eventually the independence of the region was brought to an end by the rise of [[Greek Foundation of Western Culture#Greco-Persian Wars|Achaemenid''' Persia]] (550-330 BC). Civilisation in India In spite of her size, the Indian sub-continent was in some measure insulated from the external forces by geography. To the north she was protected by some of the highest mountains in the world, and to the east lay belts of jungle. The other two sides opened out into the huge expanses of the Indian ocean. But India’s north-western frontier was more open than her others to the outside world, and it was there that the first Indian civilizations appeared on the banks of the Indus River (modern day Pakistan); the '''Harappan Civilisation (2500-1900). Agriculture came later to India than to Mesopotamia or Egypt. It too can first be traced in its north-west corner from about 6000 BC. Three thousand years later, the length of the Indus River was dotted with agricultural communities, living in mud-brick settlements within protective walls. Wheel-thrown pottery and copper implements begin to be found. When at last indisputable evidence of civilized life is available from 2500 BC, the change is startling; a remarkable civilization which stretched over more than a quarter-million square miles of the Indus valley, an area greater than either the Sumerian or Egyptian. One of its great sites is the city of Harappa from which it gets its name. There is another such site at Mohenjo-Daro; a total of 1,022 cities and settlements are known. Everything we know about the Harappans comes from archaeology, for although they had a writing system, the script has not yet been deciphered, despite many attempts. The lack of long inscriptions suggests it was limited to commerce and administration. Life in the Indus valley seems to have been highly organised and capable of carefully regulated collective works on a large scale. Weights and measures seem to have been standardised over a large area, which suggests that there may have been some real political unity. They also seem to have lived remarkably peacefully; almost no weapons have been found by archaeologists. The largest cities, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, were over two miles in circumference, and may have contained more than 30,000 people each. They each had a citadel and a residential area; streets of dense, multi-story houses were laid out on rectangular grid plans and made of bricks of standardised sizes. There were large granaries in the cities, designed with bays to receive carts and air-ducts to dry the grain. Most homes were connected to an elaborate water and sewage system with inspection holes for maintenance. The Harappans seem to have placed strong emphasis on bathing; the largest public building in Mohenjo-Daro was not a temple or palace but a great public bathhouse. Perhaps we can see in this the first manifestations of an enduring feature of Indian religion; the ritual bathing still so important to Hindus. These cities lived an economic life of some complexity. In the Harappan cities evidence survives of specialised craftsmen drawing materials and sending-out their wares across its length and breadth. The local production included three crops of great significance in the subsequent history of India; rice, sesame oil, and cotton. Indeed cotton cloth was plentiful enough to wrap bales of goods for export, marked with distinctive seals. These seals are part of our evidence for Harappan literacy; pictographs run from right to left and often feature animals and fantastical beasts. A great dockyard connected by a mile-long canal to the sea at Lothal suggests the importance of long-distant trade, and Harappan seals have been found as far away as Mesopotamia. We do not know why the first Indian civilizations began to decline, though their passing can be roughly dated. After 1900 BC, writing slowly disappeared, standardised weights and measures fell out of use, and cities were gradually abandoned. Harappan civilisation seems to have ended completely by about 1750 BC, and this coincides strikingly with the irruption into Indian history of one of its great creative forces, invading Aryan people. Little is known about the Aryans, except that they were a nomadic people of the Central Asian steppes. Waves of these migrants washed deeper and deeper into the Punjab, Indus valley, and eventually reached the upper Ganges. No doubt much violence marked their coming, for the Aryans were warriors, armed with bronze weapons and compound bows, and bringing horses and chariots. It seems clear that the Aryans brought to India no culture so advanced as that of the Harappans. Writing, for example, disappeared and did not emerge again for another millennia. Cities too had to be reinvented, for they only slowly gave up their pastoral habits and settled into agricultural life in villages. Nevertheless, the Aryans made two decisive contributions to Indian history, in its religious and in its social institutions. They laid the foundations of the Hindu religion which has been the heart of Indian civilisation. Their "holy book" was the Vedas, a collection of oral tradition of mythological accounts, prayers, and poems accumulated over centuries. Historians generally hold that Classic Hinduism crystallised very gradually by about 3rd-century BC, as a fusion of Aryan, Harappan and other Indian traditions. Aryans society was also rigidly divided into three groups; the priests or Brahmans, a warrior-aristocracy, and the ordinary peasants. This structure was gradually elaborated as society became more complex and harden into the formalised hierarchy of the Indian "Caste" system. By about 600 BC, Aryan culture had spread throughout the Ganges Valley and south down the west coast towards Gujarat. During this period, there was a clear cultural lag between the Ganges Valley and the rest of India, where metallurgy was only slowly appearing and some regions persisting in the hunting and gathering cultures of a tribal age. In contrast, a succession of small independent kingdoms developed in the Ganges Valley, usually fighting with each other, occasionally coalescing into larger groups, and then breaking up again. Nevertheless, the reemergence of cities and of writing in Sanskrit, as well as the appearance of coinage, were all giving them growing solidity. The societies in all these kingdoms were rigidly set by the caste system, and the Brahman priestly class wielded considerable power through their knowledge of the Vedas and control of rituals. This provided the impulse during the 6th century BC for religious innovators, resulting in the emergence of both Buddhism and Jainism. By the 4th-century BC, the kingdom of Magadha, centred at Pataliputra (modern Patna) in the Ganges delta, was well on the way to dominating the whole of northern India. However, any chance of stability was rudely interrupted by a dramatic arrival from the west in 326 BC, Alexander the Great. But India would have to wait just a few short years for her first great empire; the vast but short-lived Maurya Empire. Civilisation in China The most striking thing about China’s history is that it has gone on for so long. She has had a continuing experience of civilization rivalled in duration only by that of Ancient Egypt. From a very early date, there has been a Chinese nation using a Chinese language, and governing this huge region as a single unit has long been taken to be normal. For much of its history China has been in conflict either internally or with outsiders, but an uninterrupted thread runs through it. Her nationhood is as much cultural as political, crystallising early certain institutions and attitudes which were to endure; some of them seem even to transcend the revolution of the 20th century. At first sight China does not suggest much that makes for unity. Above all, northern and southern China are very different. The north is scorching and arid In summer and bare and dustblown in the winter, while the south is humid, prone to flooding, and always green. The north was prone to incursions and stimulation from the peoples of Central Asia with whom she would long have a complicated relationship, while the south was more isolated at least until the emergence of Indian Ocean Trade in the 8th century AD. China’s major internal divisions are set by three great river valleys, draining the interior roughly from west to east. From north to south, they are the Yellow River, the Yangtze and the Pearl River. In prehistory China was already divided into two cultural zones with a meeting place and mixing area on the Yellow River. It is on the banks of this river that the story of civilisation in China begins. As in other parts of the world, the coming of agriculture meant a revolution. It has been argued that peoples who lived in the semi-tropical coastal areas of southern China were clearing forests to make fields as far back as 10000 BC, before even Mesopotamia. Certainly Rice was being farmed along the Yangtze in the 7000 BC, and ground along the Yellow River begins to yield evidence of agriculture from about 5800 BC. The narrative of early times is very hard to recover, but can be outlined with some confidence China's first civilisation. Sometime about 1600 BC, a tribe called the Shang which enjoyed the military advantage of chariots, imposed herself on her neighbours over a sizable stretch of the Yellow River. At the heart of the Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 BC) was the city of An-yang and a society in which human sacrifice played a significant role. They were advanced enough to produce bronze objects of an astonishing level of skill, to use bronzed shells as a form of currency, and to mobilise large amounts of labour for the building of fortifications and cities. The area they controlled was tiny, perhaps 200km across, yet the argument for the Shang as the first Chinese dynasty relies on one crucial fact; their writing system in pictorial characters bears a remarkable similarity to modern written Chinese, often with only minor modifications. Thus China outdoes all others in devising a system which has evolved from that day to this. The Shang left an extraordinary archive of the questions asked by the rulers of an oracle, in the method of divination known as Scapulimancy. A priest applied a heated bronze point to a polished strip of bone, and the answer was revealed in the pattern of the cracks that appeared; the question asked and answer given were then written on the bone. These fortune-tellers helped the rulers make decisions of all kinds: from matchmaking to having children, from travel to financial decisions, and from whether to make peace or war. Several of the inscriptions mention human sacrifices to a silkworm goddess, usually of prisoners of war. Silk had been an important product of the region for at least a millennia before the beginning of recorded history; the earliest known Chinese silk fragments have been carbon-dated to about 2850 BC. In addition to their writing, the Shang introduced other elements of great significance in the subsequent history of China, such as chopsticks and the worship of ancestors. In this period, ancestor worship was limited to the king and a few noble families, but it was later to spread throughout Chinese society. Shang China succumbed in the end to a neighbouring group known as the Zhou. The Zhou were a frontier state to the west of An-yang, between civilisation and the marauding barbarians. After forming a confederation of neighbouring states, they overwhelmed the Shang rulers, before establishing a new capital at Xi'an. The great work of the Zhou Dynasty (1046-256) was the consolidation and refinement of the Shang heritage into their mature form, and defusion it over all of central China. There was no true unitary state. Instead, the conquered land was divided into hereditary fiefs, ruled by a warrior aristocracy of semi-mythical lineage, served by elementary bureaucracies, and linked to the ruler through a network of vassal obligations; a system akin to European feudalism. Some were more dependent on the dynasty than others, but all increasingly shared in a common culture. The nobility long enjoyed a monopoly religious practices, since only they had ancestors; the common people found a religious outlet in maintaining the worship of nature gods. The heart of the ruling house’s claim to obedience was its religious superiority. To justify their usurpation of the Shang, the Zhou also introduced the enduring concept of the Mandate of Heaven, that the heavens conferred legitimacy on a ruler, and in return the ruler was duty-bound to uphold harmony and stability. Although similar to the later European idea of divine monarchy, it depended on the behaviour of the ruler and could be withdrawn; thus revolution was legitimate under the Chinese framework as it never was in Europe. The political system collapsed from 771 BC, when a barbarian incursion drove the Zhou from their capital of Xi'an, to a new home further east at Loyang. The dynasty did not end until 256 BC, but their role became effectively reduced to ceremonial and religious duties, and dependent on a succession of great nobles. For the next five hundred years, China was characterised by almost constant conflict. By 403 BC, perhaps one hundred petty-kingdoms had been reduced to just seven, marking the beginning of the next distinguishable epoch, significantly known as the Warring States period. This era was both warlike and intellectually very rich, rather like Classical Greece during the same period. By about 500 BC, the Chinese were smelting iron and soon reached an unprecedented level of sophistication; before the end of the century, they were casting iron, something not available elsewhere until the 15th-centuries. There were scores of cities by this time, with well-defined areas for specialised craftsmen and merchants, implying an increasingly complex society. Excavation of one city reveals walls of pounded earth thirty feet high and forty thick; construction on a huge scale. Meanwhile, the price of survival for the great nobles or kings who disputed China was the elaboration of more effective governments and armed forces, and often they welcomed innovators. The era was to remain famous as the time of the Hundred Schools, when wandering scholars moved from patron to patron, expounding their teachings. One was the most famous of all Chinese thinkers; K'ung Fu Tzu (d. 479 BC), known to the west as Confucius. He was to be more profoundly respected in China than any other philosopher, and would shape his countrymen’s thinking for 2000 years. Unlike other spiritual leaders, Confucius developed a more worldly philosophy of correct thought, ethics, and respect for hierarchies, that he hoped would lead to a more stable state and society. It was immediately successful in that many of Confucius’ pupils were much sought after as advisers to the many competing kings of China. Chinese civil servants were later to be drilled in the precepts of behaviour and government which he laid down. Confucianism was so practical a creed that it was ill-equipped to satisfy the human need for something more mysterious. This was provided by Laozi (d. 531 BC), the founder of Taoism, a subtle mystery difficult to explain. The two religions, later joined by Buddhism, have been able to coexist in relative harmony throughout Chinese history. Although the late Zhou Dynasty was the cradle of the two most lasting schools of Chinese thought, it was brought to an end by a more brutal philosophy usually described as Legalism. This school argued that law-making, combined with a strict system of rewards and punishments, should replace ritual observances as the organising principle of the state. The philosophy was passionately embraced by one kingdom, who would go on the bring all the lands of the Chinese for the first time under the rule of one great empire, the 3rd-century Qin Dynasty. Civilisation in the Americas It is clear that the history of man in the Americas is much shorter than almost anywhere else in the world, although historians still argue about exactly when Mongoloid peoples crossed from Asia and began filtering slowly southwards; cave-dwellers have been traced in the Peruvian Andes as many as 15,000 years ago. Some of these cultures arrived at the invention of agriculture independently of the Old World. Farming, villages, weaving and pottery all appear in Central America before the 2000 BC. The first recognised civilisation in the Americas, the mysterious Olmec Civilisation (1200-400 BC), appeared on the Mexican Gulf coast, in the lowlands of southern Veracruz. This was a swampy, forested, and seemingly unpromising soil, but maize grew in abundance thanks to reliable rainfall and warmth all year. It earliest site is at San Lorenzo, but from around 900 BC the capital city moves further east along the Gulf coast to La Venta. For the next 500 years, La Venta was the cultural centre of a large region, trading with much of central America as far south as what is now El Salvador for jade, obsidian, and other luxuries. The Olmec established much that would persist throughout the pre-Columbian era. They lived in thrall to fearsome deities, such as the were-jaguar and feathered-serpent, from whom the gods of the later Aztec civilisation were to be descendants. They build large earth pyramids, one more than 30 metres high, that dominated the surrounding area, as powerfully as the priestly rulers dominated the local community. The concept of climbing up to a place of religious significance became the central theme of the future. It may also be that the early hieroglyphic systems of Central America originate in Olmec times, though the first surviving evidence appears a century or so after their disappearance. But it is best-known for the awesome Olmec Heads, of which there are 17 confirmed examples from four different sites. They portray grim, pug-nosed warriors, wearing curious helmets. The evidence of their sculptures and other artifacts indicate that the Olmec civilisation had a mastery of stone, were able to support talented artisans, and were capable of a high degree of social organization, moving stones weighing up to 40 tons over long distance. We do not know why or how Olmec civilisation disappeared, but it seems to have ended violently. It was nevertheless followed in roughly the same region by others, starting with the Teotihuacán Civilisation (100 BC-550 AD). At its peak, the great city had a population of about 125,000, and was the centre of probably the biggest pre-Columbian empire in North America. The Teotihuacáns continued the brutal severity of the Olmec architecture and sculpture, and contributed another defining characteristics of Meso-American culture. It's probable that they engaged in the ritual of human sacrifice, a practice that would reach its grisly peak with the Aztecs. The most brilliant of the classical civilisations of Meso-America was that of the Mayan Civilisation (250-900 AD), of eastern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador and western Honduras. Much of this region is jungle, and perhaps this inaccessibility allowed it to outlast all rivals in a succession of violent upheavals. The Maya attained heights of artistic and architectural expression, and of learning in astronomy, mathematics and astrology, which were never to be surpassed. The Maya also made the greatest use of writing in hieroglyphs, although it was used almost exclusively for either calculations connected with the calendar and astronomy, and to list rulers and their conquests. The other great centre of civilisation in the Americas was much further south in Peru, where the Chavín civilisation (900-250 BC) flourished throughout much of the highlands and the coast. In fact, this may not have been Peru's first civilisation. In recent years archaeologists have revealed a far earlier complex society known as the Norte Chico. Aspero was the first of many sites to be discovered, the largest being Caral. Sophisticated architecture has been carbon-dating to around 3000 BC, which would mark it contemporary with the beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia and Egypt. We know more about the Chavín, whose main ceremonial site, the magnificent Chavín de Huántar, is about 10,000 feet above sea level in Peru's Cordillera Blanca. One of its characteristics was repeated representations in stone of fantastic beasts, stylised jaguar or puma faces with prominently religious overtones. More importantly, this period represented great early developments in weaving, pottery, agriculture, metalwork, religion and architecture. After the decline of Chavín, over the next thousand or so years, several cultures became locally important: the Paracas Culture (800-100 BC) produced cotton and wool textiles of fine quality; the Moche Culture (100-800 AD) made pottery from press molds and were the ambitious builders of the Huaca del Sol stepped pyramid; and the Nazca Culture (450–550 AD) produced the enigmatic and mysterious giant designs in the desert known as the Nazca Lines. A pattern of civilsation in the Americas had been set by its emergence in Mexico and Peru, which endured all the way down to the fatal arrival of Christopher Columbus in the 1492 AD. A succession of highly developed cultures, all strongly influenced by their predecessors, in the same two limited regions. When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they would find and destroy the Aztec Civilisation of Mexico and Inca Civilisation centred in Peru. Both were highly organised and complex cultures, but had developed much slower than Europe, and lacked many features long taken for granted in the Old World; there were no wheeled vehicles; advanced knowledge of metalwork; and literacy beyond the rulers and priests. There were a number of crucial factors in this. First, the Americas developed in utter isolation, with even overland contact between Mexico and Peru posing pretty impenetrable natural obstacles, and neither was particularly strong seafarers. Secondly, neither region had animals suitable for herding, riding and ploughing, with horses having gone extinct in the Americas before the arrival of civilisation; Peru did domesticate llamas but their mountain habitat meant they were unsuitable for anything but herding. Finally, the ruling elite and priestly classes preserved writing for their own privileged purposes, thus their societies were denied the liberating magic of literacy. The Rest of the World Outside the Cradles of Civilisation, some remarkable had been done by 776 BC. For instance, Africa outside Egypt had produced her first kingdom, that of Kush (modern day Sudan) with its capital at Napata and later Meroe; by 730 BC, Kush was strong enough to conquer Egypt and five of its kings ruled as the Pharaohs. However, when given their due weight, they lack the complexity of those ancient civilisations which were to found durable traditions. For huge areas of the world, their story is not history but still prehistory, and this includes Western Europe. This uncomfortable fact has led some enthusiasts to claim Europe's undeniably striking Megaliths as another seat of early civilisation, almost as if its people were some sort of depressed class needing historical rehabilitation. It remains interesting for its own sake, but not yet for any positive contribution to world history. By 5000 BC, farming communities existed as far west as northern France and the Netherlands, and soon after appeared in the British Isles. Before 4000 BC, mine-shafts in what is now Yugoslavia were sunk 60 feet below ground to get at copper, and in many other sites two-millenia later. By about 1800 BC the resulting cultures seem to have fragmented sufficiently for us to identify among them the ancestors of the Celts, Slavs, Teutonic tribes, and the Finns (linguistically non-Indo-European). The thousands of megalithic monuments to be found stretching in a broad arc from Malta, Sardinia and Corsica do represent huge concentrations of labour, careful observation of the astronomical year, and argue for well-developed social organisation. Yet to the great civilisations which rose and fell in the river valleys of the eastern Mediterranean, Europe was largely an irrelevance, or of interest only as a supplier of minerals and metals. Europe’s age was still to come; hers would be the last great civilisation to appear. Organised Religion The Ancient era was a great foundation age for organised religions. Older faiths with deep roots such as Judaism and Hinduism were being formalised thanks to the invention of writing. Meanwhile a wave of great religious leaders between the 9th and 2nd century were providing new ways of thinking: the Buddha (d. 483 BC); Mahavira (d. 6th-century BC) the founders of Jainism; K'ung Fu Tzu (d. 479) the founder of Confucianism; and Laozi (d. 5th century BC) the founder of Taoism. These newer and older faiths all contended innumerable pagan creeds. No people has produced a greater historical impact from such comparatively insignificant origins than the Jews, whom the Egyptians called Hebrews, a word meaning "wanderer". The origins lie among the nomadic Semitic peoples of Arabia, who by about 3000 BC had spread across the richer lands of Mesopotamia. The Hebrew people were the first people to arrive at an abstract notion of one monotheistic God, just and merciful, stern to punish sin but ready to welcome the sinner who repented. This was in fact a gradual process, whose essential steps were not complete before the 8th-century BC. In earlier times, they were probably polytheistic, like other Semitic peoples, believing that there were many gods but worshipped only one. According to Genesis, God first revealed himself to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham and made a special Covenant with him and his descendants; this special relationship between the Jews and God is at the heart of Judaism. God told Abraham to leave his home in Ur, and lead his people to Canaan (the ancient name for Palestine) where he promised to make them a great nation; scholars put the likely date at about 1800 BC in the confusion following the end of Sumer. In Canaan, God renewed the Covenant with Abraham's grandson Jacob, giving him a new name, Israel. Jacob eventually had twelve sons, from each of whom the twelve tribes of Israel descend. But Canaan proved an arid land, and the Hebrews soon moved south to Egypt in a time of famine. It was probably in Egypt that the Jews adopted the custom of circumcision, a practice common there, which became a symbol of their Covenant with God. In Egypt, Abraham's people sank to the status of slaves, until Moses brought them out of Egypt through the miracles of the Ten Plagues and parting of the Red Sea; we can speculate this happened during the Hyksos ascendancy around 1700 BC, since only then could a foreigner rise high in the Pharaoh’s service as Moses supposedly did. Moses gave the Jews a new sense of unity during the journey back to Canaan, with another renewal of God's Covenant in the Ten Commandments; another key concept to their faith, that God demands moral righteousness and social justice. In Canaan, a long and fierce struggle ensued against the native Canaanites and powerful Philistines, until the Kingdom of Israel was established by Saul in about 1050 BC. Although the tribes quarrelled with one another, Israel prospered under Saul's successors, David and Solomon, with a capital founded at Jerusalem, though for a long time it was a little place of filth and confusion. The cost and taxes needed to build Solomon's Temple to house the Ark of the Covenant containing the Ten Commandments, prompted widespread unrest in the kingdom. Criticism of existing political power was always likely in a society where prophets emphasized that all men were equal in the sight of God, and that kings might not simply do what they would. After Solomon’s death in 931 BC, the kingdom split into two; the southern kingdom of Judah composed of two tribes, and the ten northern tribes of Israel. In Israel, worship of God became contaminated by the polytheism of the agriculturists among whom the Hebrews had settled in Canaan. It's association with a local bull cult, the Golden Calf, invited God’s wrath in the form of an invasion by Assyria in 722 BC; the ten tribes disappeared from history in mass deportations. Judah lasted longer, being more compact and somewhat less in the path of great powers. It survived until 587 BC, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonian armies of Nebuchadnezzar. The Hebrews either fled to Egypt or were carried away to slavery in Babylon, to the great experience of The Exile, a period so important and formative that after it we may properly speak of the Jews. It was during this time that many aspects of Judaism were refined to their mature form. Firstly, the lasting and powerful ability of the Jews to retain their own identity in adversity. Secondly, the Torah or Old Testament took its lasting form; the holy book would be the great unifying agent of Judaism. Thirdly, by necessity, synagogues appeared as places of Jewish worship, as well as more elaborate ceremonies. And finally, the concept of the Messiah entered Jewish tradition, a beacon of light during the dark times of Babylonian enslavement. The Persians conquered Babylon in 539 BC, and the Jews were allowed to return to Jerusalem, where they ruled a tiny territory for a time. The Messiah acquired even greater appeal during the next period of disaster for the Jews, under Roman occupation from 63 BC. The complex Indian religion of Hinduism 'is probably even older than Judaism, but we can glean far less about its history. The tradition itself maintains that it is timeless and has always existed. It roots certainly go very deep indeed; Shiva, one of the key focus of modern Hindu devotion, can be traced back to innumerable fertility cults of prehistory. The origins lie among the Aryan people of Central Asia who migrated into the Indian subcontinent in waves from 1750 BC. They brought with them the ''Vedas, a collection of oral tradition of mythological accounts, prayers, and poems accumulated over centuries, then shaped by settlement in India, until it settled into its mature form around 1000 BC. Hindu theologians considered the texts revelations by ancient sages after intense meditation, that have been carefully preserved since ancient times. Historians generally hold that Classic Hinduism crystallised very gradually, as a fusion of Aryan, Harappan and other Indian traditions. The sacred Upanishads texts, dating from about 700 BC, mark the next important evolution. They are a mixed bag of about 250 devotional reflections of holy men that moved the religion towards a more philosophical basis. By about 3rd-century BC, when the classical Vedic texts coalesced, the Mahabharata and Ramayana, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva were emerging as the main Hindu gods. Brahma is the central and senior figure in the Hindu trinity, associated with creation, while Vishnu is the preserver and Shiva the destroyer, in the eternal cycle. Brahma has had no popular cult in India, for he is in a sense the godhead behind all the other gods. But Vishnu and Shiva became firmly established as the two main deities of popular Hinduism. The majority of temples in India today are sacred to one or the other. Vishnu is believed to have had many different incarnations and he is usually worshipped as one of these, most frequently Krishna. Temples to Shiva are easily recognisable, invariably featuring the reclining figure of Nandi, the sacred bull who carries Shiva on any journey. Behind the colourful polytheistic pantheon of gods, at the heart of Hinduism lies a world view in which all things are linked in an all-embracing web of being. The tally of a person's life is one's Karma, ''combining the following of sacred practices and good works. In the short term one's karma will lead to reincarnation in more or less fortunate circumstances, between castes for example, or even between the human and animal worlds. The ultimate purpose of any devout Hindu is to escape from the recurring pattern of existence. In India of the 6th-century BC, the Hindu Brahman priestly class enjoyed considerably power and privilege through their knowledge of the ''Vedas and control of rituals. To kill a Brahman for instance became the gravest of crimes; even kings could not always contend with their powers. This, and the rigidity of the Caste system, provided an impulse for religious innovators; holy men were always an important aspect of Hinduism. One very successful cult was '''Jainism, a creation of the teacher Mahavira. He, among other things, preached an avoidance of taking any form of life, and that all living things shared with mankind the possession of a soul. This obviously made agriculture or animal husbandry impossible, so Jains tended to become merchants, with the result that in modern times the Jain community is one of the wealthiest in India. But much the most important of these innovators was Siddhartha Gautama, founder of Buddhism. Gautama was not a Brahman, but a prince of the warrior class. Followed a pattern not uncommon in India at this time, Gautama rejected the privileged life into which he had been born, and left home to seek a more personal religion. His first recourse was asceticism, renouncing material possessions and physical pleasures while reflecting upon spiritual matters. Seven years of this proved to him that he was on the wrong road, and instead he sought a middle path of meditating, in moderate comfort, until he achieved spiritual enlightenment. After several days sitting under a pipal tree at the village of Buddh Gaya in Bihar, Gautama achieved a moment of pure enlightenment and became the Buddha or "the enlightened one". He began to preach and teach, propounding an austere and ethical doctrine called the Eightfold Path, whose ultimate aim was to attain the blessed state of nirvana, and freedom from the endless cycle of rebirth and transmigration. The Buddha proved to have great practical and organising ability, establishing numerous Buddhist monasteries and giving his work an institutional form that would outlived him. Buddhist monks became familiar figures in northern India, wandering villages and towns with their begging bowls, eager to describe the path to personal salvation. It would doubtless have remained just one of many minor Indian cults, but for the enthusiastic support of Ashoka, king of India's first great empire, the Maurya Empire. New developments would occur in Buddhism such as the emergence of Mahayana Buddhism, which asserted the divinity of the Buddha. Buddhist monks would also make it the first of the world religions to spread beyond the society in which it was born, to southeast Asia, and along the Silk Road to China and beyond. It was ultimately to become the most widespread religion in Asia and a potent force in world history. Meanwhile in China, the religion of the early dynasties was a form of ancestor worship, monopolised by the nobility since only they had ancestors. The five century long decline of the Zhou Dynasty from the 7th-century BC, was a period both warlike and intellectually very rich, rather like Classical Greece during the same period. It has become known as the era of the Hundred Schools, when wandering scholars moved about from patron to patron, expounding their teachings. One was the most famous of all Chinese thinkers, K'ung Fu Tzu (d. 479 BC); known in the West as Confucius. He was to be more profoundly respected in China than any other philosopher, and would shape his countrymen’s thinking for 2000 years. Confucius was a member of the lesser nobility who may have spent some time as a minor minister of state. When he could not find a ruler to put into practice his recommendations for just government he turned to meditation and teaching. Unlike other spiritual leaders, Confucius taught more worldly principles. Somewhere in the past, he thought, lay a mythical age when each man knew his place and did his duty; to return to that was Confucius’s ethical goal. He developed a philosophical and political system of correct thought and ethics that he hoped would lead to a more stable state and society. His ideals were deeply conservative, based on an unchanging pattern of respect and obedient toward hierarchies; ruler to subject, husband to wife and children, seniority within a bureaucracy. In his later years, Confucius ran a school, and his young graduates were much in demand as advisers to the many competing kings of China. Generations of Chinese civil servants were later to be drilled in the precepts of behaviour and government which he laid down. Confucian texts, known as the Thirteen Classics, were later to be treated with something like religious awe. Confucianism was so practical a creed that it was ill-equipped to satisfy the human need for something more mysterious. Laozi (d. 531 BC), another great teacher, was supposedly the author of the text which is the key document of the philosophical system later called 'Taoism. '''According to “''The Way and its Power”, everything in the entire universe flows with an unknowable force called the Tao, and the power are various disciplines for achieving perfection by becoming one with the unplanned rhythms of the universe. How this is achieved is a subtle mystery. Confucianism and Taoism are like two sides of the same Chinese coin; opposite and complementary, the practical and the spiritual. The two religions, later joined by Buddhism, have been able to coexist in relative harmony throughout Chinese history. Category:Historical Periods